How The Huawei Mate 10's NPU Finally Proved Itself Five Months After Release

The Mate 10 Pro is a good looking phone, but it's what on the inside that counts.

There are few things more eyeroll-inducing to the savvy reader (or savvy journalist) than marketing departments throwing industry buzzwords around carelessly, and the worst offender may just be tech industry's current love affair with the term "A.I."

The truth is, A.I. on phones is nothing new at all. It's existed on mainstream smartphones for more than half a decade. Apple's Siri, which became available to the public in 2011, is A.I. So, too, is Google's "Now" experiment and all those annoying cards that cluttered Android interfaces since 2013.

And so when Huawei released a phone last fall with a marketing campaign focusing almost entirely on its A.I. prowess, most journalists took those claims with a significant grain of salt. Read through that phone's reviews, and see how many writers praised the Mate 10 Pro but doubted whether the NPU had any real effect on real-world performance. I think I was one of the few writers who gave Huawei the benefit of the doubt, but even then I conceded in my review I wasn't sure that the much-marketed NPU scene recognition really improved the Mate 10 Pro's photography. Most of us reviewers liked the Mate 10 Pro, we were just dubious about whether or not the NPU mattered.

But at the Mobile World Congress last month, about five months after the release of the Mate 10 Pro, I finally experienced the difference between an NPU and the current CPU/GPUs on mobile devices in two different exercises.

The first: the Mate 10 Pro drove a Porsche. Okay, it's slightly less impressive than it sounds. The drive was just a short distance, and in a completely controlled setting. But considering that Huawei's engineers say they only spent five weeks putting the program together, it was still quite impressive. Essentially, Huawei strapped a telephoto camera on top of a Porsche Panamera, which fed road-footage to the Mate 10 Pro, which can recognize objects and scenes in real time using its NPU.

Ben Sin

A Porsche Panamera with a telephoto camera rig on top and a Mate 10 Pro on the dashboard.

I rode in the car for a couple of test runs, and both times the car -- going up to 30 miles-per-hour -- was able to correctly identify life-sized cutouts of a dog, a cyclist, and a soccer ball -- and react accordingly according to my pre-set commands.

This showcase highlights why an NPU is needed. Because it's purpose-built to run A.I. directly onboard the device instead of relying on the cloud (as many other smartphones do), the Mate 10 Pro can read and react to obstacles on the road almost instantaneously. A phone without an NPU can run the same exercise with the same image recognition software, but it would not be able to scan road footage and react anywhere near as fast. And when it comes to self-driving cars, a difference in milliseconds can result in life or death.

The second exercise that made me realize the NPU's power, ironically, came from a rival phone company. LG released an A.I.-powered update to its V30 at MWC, and I have been testing the device. One of the standout features of the phone is an ability to identify objects, just like the Mate 10 Pro. And also just like the Mate 10 Pro, the LG V30S also does all of this machine learning on-device, without needing an internet connection. However, the V30S is using a standard GPU to power LG's A.I. algorithms, and it's noticeably slower. When I point the V30S at a flower, the phone can indeed identify the plant, but only after about three to four seconds of processing. The Mate 10 Pro can do it instantly, almost every time.

Ben Sin

The V30S can identify scenes and objects with its built-in A.I. algorithm.

A phone needing an extra couple seconds to do something relatively frivolous doesn't matter much right now, but in the future, when we rely on A.I. and "machine learning" to take care of more and more tasks? Then every millisecond will count.

So while companies like Asus throw around the term "A.I." to the point of dilution, Huawei has proven its A.I. ambitions are legitimate -- even if we're still probably a year or two away from the NPU being of real use in everyday situations.